“Hello?” someone answered on the first ring.
“I’m looking for Birdy,” said Ruthanne.
“You found her.”
“Birdy? Really? It’s me. It’s Ruthanne.”
They met up together despite their distance. Birdy had always been a beauty, stunning everyone around her, but had now surpassed what seemed humanly possible. She’d cut her hair short. Short! A curly mop on top, the sides gone. Looked like a white girl, with a style like that. The eye makeup she wore was dramatic and bold. Lipstick, dark red. Clothes, fitted and black. She looked like a cat.
It was silly to fall in love with her, but Ruthanne did, and for months they kissed and fucked and read each other poetry and became vegan and watched movies they hated at fancy art houses. That ended, too, when Birdy shriveled like the deferred dream in Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem.” It was AIDS, of course. It was always AIDS, Ruthanne had learned. Every disappeared old friend. Every family member who passed under sudden and mysterious circumstances. Every lover.
Ruthanne supposed there was a good chance she was HIV-positive now, too, though she wouldn’t get tested. She couldn’t write her own death sentence, couldn’t let her possibilities end here.
She was glad Uncle Buck was dead because he’d never have to know her immune system was possibly being bludgeoned this very moment. And she was glad her parents were dead for the same reason. For how they always thought her so snotty and snobbish, putting on airs, and they’d feel gratified that her end would be as undignified as theirs.
It did occur to her to end it, like her father had, overwhelmed by grief at the death of his wife, Clarissa, so it was good that she met Andre Wilder one Tuesday at the library. She was researching the best ways to die, and he was studying for his GED. He was trying to get into community college and eventually a four-year university. Then go to seminary school. A clear, bright, well-lit path.
Ruthanne tried her hand at going back to school, too, and eventually they were taking classes together locally. They ate out together. They had fun. Though they’d been fraternizing for nearly a year, they had not yet discussed their respective pasts. Andre wasn’t the type to ask, and Ruthanne wasn’t the type to offer.
Ruthanne suffered pregnancy patiently and diligently. Absorbed in the task of motherhood, she read every book. There were different opinions, of course, on what was to be done, but all she knew was that she wanted the very opposite of her own girlhood for her new baby, whom she would name Vern after her Great-Uncle Buck （Vernon Buckley）。
There would be constancy. There would be a father who worked a good job and a mother who was at home with the baby, tending to its every whim and need. There would be things like Pizza Fridays and Soup Mondays. Back-to-school shopping. Eventually they’d be able to afford a modest home in the suburbs.
The early morning when the doctor laid her baby into her arms and she put it to her breast was the happiest Ruthanne had ever felt. She was made for this. Girl Found. That was what Ruthanne was. There was nothing like a baby to tether you.
“You are white as a ghost,” Andre said to the baby, smiling.
“Shh, don’t say that,” Ruthanne chided. “She’s white as the petal of a beautiful flower.”
The two of them moved in together, but after six months, it was clear that wasn’t going to work. Andre found Ruthanne moody and distant, and Ruthanne found Andre dull and unambitious.
They both stopped taking classes. Had to. Andre got a trucking job, and Ruthanne took care of her baby full-time, until they could afford that no longer. She got work at a fast-food joint, then at a department store, before she was fired for shoplifting baby clothes.
Vern, at least, was smart as a whip. Her first phrase was, Yes, ma’am, at ten months old. It made Ruthanne’s heart well up with the loveliest memories to hear it, and from then on, she had her daughter call her ma’am because it made her think of Freddy-Mae and Buck and the eight years of her life that were utter perfection.
Ruthanne couldn’t afford a good day care and had to hire a woman named Sally Dee to look after Vern. She had too many charges and fed the children frosted cereals and red Kool-Aid. It was not the vision of parenthood Ruthanne had.
She started dealing again to make ends meet. She was able to put Vern in a proper preschool when she was two and a half, though it was not the come-up she’d been hoping for. Ruthanne was often late dropping Vern off to school, and late to pick her up. She worked multiple jobs and arrived scattered and unkempt. Likewise, Vern often looked a mess. Hair undone. Old clothes that were a little too small. Threadbare. Ruthanne rarely had enough extra cash for even shopping at Goodwill. Ms. Katy, Vern’s teacher, was the one to call Social Services. What else was there to do with a child so clearly neglected? Certainly not offer resources and support.